frogs4all

Thanks for all your excellent advice, everyone. Much appreciated.

Nothing like that. We've involved Building Control because we've replaced the original, bowed timber beam which supported the first floor with an RSJ and have had to replace the ground floor joists. We also intend to insulate to current standards or as close as we can get. So there's a lot of change to the fabric but not to the layout.

Thanks Conor. I am not sure I understand the "room within a room" idea but I think I understand what you mean: there is no way to contain a fire on the ground floor (e.g. by closing a door) to create a protected escape route through the ground floor? Have I understood that correctly? If so, I'm not sure why concerns have not been raised about the front bedroom. Because of the old shop layout, the stairs start at the back of the living area, right next to the kitchen. We could provide a door to the living area and a door to the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs if that would help. Either door could be closed to create an escape route through the living room to the front door or through the kitchen to the back door.

Interesting, thanks very much Mr Punter. The housing is densely packed so there's no way we or any of our neighbours would pass the fire refuge requirement. We are moving the partition wall between the 2 bedrooms slightly to even up the room sizes. This results in the back bedroom being about 450mm longer. There will be slightly less space in all rooms due to internal wall insulation and there will be new windows which will allow for egress in a fire. I don't think any of those should have an impact on their assessment but happy to be corrected.

We're renovating a 2-bed 1905 brick terrace house in London. Formerly a shop but used as a residence for 20+ years and had change of use. We're not changing the layout of internal rooms or windows but Building Control has raised concerns about fire escape from the 1st floor back bedroom window: "Ground floor is an open plan layout so means of escape from the rear bedroom is a problem because of the length of the garden." The garden is really a small, tiled yard about 1.4m wide and 5.5m long with brick walls separating it from 2 neighbours' gardens. No concerns about the front bedroom windows which open above the street. I am struggling to understand why the open plan ground floor and the size of the yard is relevant here. Proximity to the house perhaps? Evacuees could always go over the wall to a neighbouring garden and I'm happy to provide a way to assist with that if necessary. My intuition is that getting out of a 1st floor window and down 3m+ to ground level would be a more difficult feat than getting over the wall. I've not seen any regulations concerning the size of the outdoor space so any guidance or thoughts would be very welcome! Thanks in advance!

Great advice, thank you JohnMo. I've concluded I'll skip UFH entirely for now. When/if I figure out what to do with the concrete + timber floor room downstairs, I'll reconsider whether to have UFH in that room and retrofit to the other downstairs room, which is next to it.

Thanks JohnMo. We love the UFH in our kitchen, which is why I'd like the other rooms to have it too. But it is good to challenge my thinking on this - thank you. We only have 2 rooms to do on the ground floor. One is a suspended timber floor, which I'd like to renovate soon. I want to insulate between the joists. Putting in UFH trays and piping at the same time might make sense. The other is suspended timber with a patch of uninsulated concrete where an entrance hall/corridor used to be. I'm not sure what to do with this one but we won't have a chance to do it for quite a while. The upstairs rooms are timber floors. UFH is appealing but they are all carpeted, which I guess might reduce heat transfer from UFH into the rooms? Since we already have radiators in, do you think it would make sense to lay the UFH trays and piping under the floorboards, leave them disconnected, use the existing (or up-rated) radiators for now and switch to UFH when the whole house is ready? We only need the floorboards up in the ground floor rooms (for the insulation) - and one room is far in the future. The only reason I can see for lifting them in upstairs rooms would be to install UFH.

Hi everyone, We renovating a house we're living in, slowly, one room at a time. Can we install wet underfloor heating in each room as we renovate it? We have a newish combi boiler driving 2 circuits using a diverter valve. The kitchen has underfloor heating with (what sounds like) its own pump. The rest of the house has radiators, most fed by 10mm microbore. The main circulating loops are 15mm and 22mm pipework. During the winter we need a 55 Celsius flow temperature. All the rooms (apart from the kitchen) are timber floors. I'm not sure how to construct a hybrid heating system of underfloor and radiators. Is it feasible to install underfloor heating in a single room we're renovating and connect it back to the main central heating loop? A central manifold doesn't look easy and I'd rather contain the changes within the room being renovated. The longer term plan is to replace all the radiators with underfloor heating, run at a lower flow temperature and, one day, replace the combi boiler with a heat pump. So if each room's UFH needs something to reduce the flow temperature in that room, there needs to be an easy way to switch to whole-house UFH with a lower flow temperature in future.

Hi @Redbeard and @Mr Punter Most things I want to tackle incrementally as time, funds and especially opportunity allows. There are some larger jobs that need doing, e.g. replace thin and mostly blown DGUs, strip back attic room walls, remove slumped fibreglass insulation, re-insulate, re-board and re-plaster. But there are also lots of smaller easier wins, e.g. fill holes left in building envelope when services were removed in the past, replace very leaky stable door to kitchen, etc, top up loft insulation (the loft is in the 1993 part and the attic room is in the 1905 part). But I'm starting to think I should draw up a floorplan as-is and annotate the changes required, problem areas and existing services. Good advice, thank you. I'm pretty sold on MVHR after getting a single-room Envirovent unit for the bathroom. It's not perfect (and neither was the installation) but I can see how MVHR could work for the whole house. I'm not planning to install MVHR yet. It doesn't seem worth it while the house is so leaky. But I have a plan that covers most of the house with 2 problem rooms left to solve. Well done for keeping going!

Hi everyone, I'm pleased to meet you all! I've done a lot of reading here and elsewhere on energy efficiency, retrofit, solar PV, MVHR, ASHP and battery storage. And I've concluded what I need to worry about right now is insulation and airtightness. So this is what I want to address as we renovate. When it's windy, the door to the attic blows open, and we can feel the wind through the living room windows. Parts of the house are uninsulated and what insulation there is is not very thick or consistent. Almost all windows are timber double-glazed but most have airtightness issues or the glazing units have blown or are very thin. The house is in Gloucestershire and is a complicated mix of small stone end-of-terrace cottage, doubled in size around 1905 when the whole terrace had a brick frontage added, 2 storey extension to the side in 1993, then conservatory added at the back, which was rebuilt in masonry around 2005 and partly knocked through into the 1993 kitchen to leave a strange ground floor plan. We bought about 4 years ago, knocked through completely and rationalised the ground floor plan to create a much larger kitchen. We also renovated the bathroom and living room. The rest of the house needs work. We live in the house and probably have enough space now to shuffle around as we renovate room-by-room but that doesn't lend itself to getting builders in as well as it does to DIY. I dream of building our own house one day, but I don't know if I will live long enough to persuade my wife 😉 I'm looking forward to drawing on your collective wisdom! Duncan